Ars’ resident racer takes a second look at Forza Motorsport 5

Does Microsoft's latest console racer need an early pitstop for repairs?

After months of waiting, a little time with some prerelease builds, and a slight panic over whether I'd actually get an Xbox One before January, last Friday saw the nice UPS man drop off the new console and a copy of Forza Motorsport 5. You may have already read our review of the game last week, but I'm Ars Technica's resident racer, so Gaming Editor Kyle Orland asked me to share my thoughts on Turn 10's latest racing opus.

In doing so, I've gone back to look at the glowing review I gave the previous installment, Forza Motorsport 4, just over two years ago. I was blown away by the previous game, unhesitatingly crowning it the king of the console racers. But that was then and this is now, and we're looking at a completely new console and a somewhat different marketplace mindset. Has Turn 10 managed to keep its crown, or are the hordes of Internet forum haters right to give the game a bad reception?

In short, FM5 is not as good as FM4 was at launch, but the previous game wasn't perfect on day one either. And no, FM5 is not as bad as GT5 was when it came out. There are several reasons why, and I think they're unfortunately indicative of a number of trends affecting the industry. We may have to start getting used to them.

The Good

Don't get me wrong—there is an awful lot to like about FM5, especially when you consider just how much of the game is completely new. For one thing, it looks stunning. All of the cars are modeled in extremely high resolution, and the Autovista feature of the previous version is available for every car, letting you explore each one up close and personal (although not with your hands via the Kinect). They sound great, too; I might not have the best home theater setup on the planet, but over DTS the game is fantastically immersive.

The tracks all look amazing. In FM4, some of the tracks seemed to be quite clearly carried over from an earlier time, and they were horribly washed out (I'm looking at you, Sebring and Laguna Seca). Now, running at 60 FPS in 1080p, you can pick out the individual blades of grass by the side of the track (and it looks like Indianapolis needs to bring the mower out because it's getting pretty tall). The inclusion of Spa Francorchamps, the legendary Belgian circuit, is a very welcome addition, as is Australia's Bathurst, which will be somewhat familiar to those of you who remember Blue Mountain in the original Forza Motorsport. The F1 circuit at Yas Marina in Abu Dhabi is as eye-catching as it is on TV, and the street circuit at Prague may in time become a worthy successor to the much-loved and now missing Maple Valley.

The virtual glare of the sunlight through certain corners is just as annoying as it is in real life, and even the occasional lens flare seems in place. Little details like the way the dashboards of some cars reflect in their windscreens are also very well done. The livery editor now includes a lot of pre-made finishes, from matte carbon fiber weave to polished brass or gold (in case you want to make a C-3PO car). I even enjoy the between-race contributions of Top Gear's presenters, something I didn't anticipate. I like the show, but I wasn't sure I'd enjoy their buffoonery every time I sat down for a session. Yet the intros to each racing series are very well done, with more than enough car nerdery in there for someone like me.

Then there's the completely new tire physics. Last time, much was made of the then-new physics model that Turn 10 built to incorporate data from Italian tire company Pirelli. Two years later and all that is out the window, replaced instead by data generated by Calspan, an aerospace and transportation research company based in Buffalo, New York. Even though Pirelli's data was good, it wasn't good enough for Dan Greenawalt and the Turn 10 team.

FM4's game engine allowed the developers to input Pirelli's raw testing data straight in, but the tire company wasn't able to control for the degradation in grip as the tires heated up or wore down. Calspan stepped in to help solve this interesting research challenge. Turn 10 shipped them a load of tires, which Calspan then took to the track, turning rubber into bits, bytes, and probably a fair amount of smoke.

The new physics are subtle but evident. I notice it most under heavy braking, when they'll heat up and lose grip, and overall I'd say the game feels even closer to the actual sensation of driving a car on a race track, with the pretty big caveat of not being able to play it with a steering wheel. The inclusion of a 2013 Formula 1 car, in the shape of the Lotus E31, blows any F1 game I've ever tried out of the water: Codemasters, you've been served.

The new cloud AI is also worth noting. If the cars you're racing against aren't living, breathing gamers somewhere else in the world, they're behaving as if they were. For a game that originally started as an AI project at Microsoft's research unit in Cambridge, UK, this seems like a natural progression.

Throughout the series, the AI has learned from each player's driving style, and at various times there have been "Drivatars" that one could send off to complete races in their place. That was always a local process though; my driving style taught my AI, and my Drivatar could race against AI on my console. As the cloud takes over, that has changed, and each player's data is fed back up to the servers where it's used to populate races everywhere and anywhere. Depending on the difficulty level, you'll probably see some of the people on your friends list as well as lots of random pubbies populating the course.

By and large this is a good thing, although I'm interested in revisiting the Drivatar system in a few months once people have spent a lot more time with the game. The first couple of days after the launch featured some pretty shoddy AI driving as the various Drivatars went off into the world based on a handful of laps. Even now I find myself racing with damage turned off because the chances of a giant accident at the first or second corner remain high. Lots of folks out there are really bad drivers, and even on a pretty high difficulty level it's not uncommon to see some behavior from your opponents that seems less suited to the racetrack and more to I-95 (I'm talking to you, Virginia).

Another neat touch is the way that Drivatar cars will pull paint jobs from the cloud, too (this can be disabled). Some of them can be shockingly bad (there are an awful lot of poo-brown liveries out there), but others are quite eye-catching. Once the Marketplace gets turned on, I'm sure it will help grow that virtual community.

The Bad

As I mentioned earlier, Internet forums across the world are alight with gripes and grouses. "They left out the Nurburgring Nordschleife." "Not enough cars." "I can't use my steering wheel." "They're nickel-and-diming me." These complaints are not without merit.

The omission of the 12.8-mile ribbon of road that snakes across the Eifel Mountains in Germany is hard to accept. Widely accepted as the most challenging race track on the planet, it has been a staple of both Gran Turismo and Forza for many years. Plenty of other Forza favorites are absent in FM5 as well. The 'Ring is coming back in January, by all accounts, and I'd be surprised if we don't see other tracks join it over time. Still, this is a topic I've discussed with creator Dan Greenawalt in the past, and unfortunately he says there's much less commercial pressure to create new tracks as DLC compared to cars.

Then there's the reduced car count. Porsche is AWOL again, presumably due to IP issues with EA (who holds an exclusive license to use the German cars in video games, unless it expired recently). But even compared to FM3, the choice of cars feels slight. This will no doubt change through the release of DLC, which Forza players should be no strangers to. We can hope for another Porsche expansion pack, but those of you who have come to expect 800 cars and 25 tracks every two years for $60 an installment are going to be disappointed.

Like many of you out there in gameforumland, I can't say I'm terribly happy about the fact that Microsoft decided to throw away any backward compatibility with Xbox 360 peripherals. I, too, have a fair amount 'invested' in a super-duper steering wheel/pedal/stand setup, for which the only saving grace is knowing that at least it should still work with Gran Turismo 6 (due out next month). Back in 2011, I noted how the game truly came alive with a decent force feedback wheel, and for the last few years I've played almost exclusively with one. Having to go back to using a controller is pretty jarring, and I am counting the days until Thrustmaster and Mad Catz release their Xbox One compatible wheels.

As our review noted, FM5 delivers haptic feedback via the controller triggers as well as through the grips of the controller, so you get some information about wheelspin under acceleration (right hand) or brake lockup (left hand). Still, there's no feedback for the steering. Maybe I could be incredibly precise with a thumbstick when I was in my early 20s, but in my opinion there is simply no substitute for the control a wheel gives you. Like the Drivatar issue, this is something I am looking forward to reassessing in a few months when the peripheral market has caught up.

A bunch of other small things irritate me. Voice commands were great in FM4 and worked from just about anywhere. Now that the Xbox One accepts a lot of system-level voice commands, there seem to be fewer ways to use FM5-specific commands (and then only on certain screens). There doesn't appear to be any way of tuning your car between races in a given series or even loading track-specific tuning setups (this is a horrible omission, Turn 10—please put it back, or tell me where it is in case I missed it).

Enlarge/ Racing through the streets of Prague. I'm keeping a lookout for Agent XXX but am yet to spot him.

I love the addition of some open wheel cars, presumably now possible due to the progress made in processing power. It's not that we couldn't have had them earlier, but rendering the suspension components moving at 60 FPS was probably the impediment until now (although intellectual property rights probably had a role, too). With IndyCars now in the game, it's a pity that there's only a single oval track on which to race them, and it still doesn't seem possible to tune different left- and right-side suspension settings (important if you're only turning left).

The reality

Lastly, the revised reward structure has a big impact on how FM5 plays. Gone are the days of winning cars at the end of each championship. Welcome, instead, to 1970s era inflation—especially when it comes to the tokens you can buy (for real cash) to circumvent the grind.

Let's not pretend that microtransactions are new to the franchise; they've been with us for years now, and they're a dependable way for developers and publishers to evergreen a title and make a return on all those hours of creation. And now that the industry knows enough people will open their wallets for them on an ongoing basis, it's time to accept that they're here to stay. What's more, it's not like you'd avoid them if you stuck to Gran Turismoor iRacing or <insert racing franchise here>. Game developers need to eat too, and maybe it just isn't possible to put together a completely new game on the scale of FM4 or GT4 (both of which were iterative and built on their predecessors) in two years if it's only going to sell for $60.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the issues highlighted above all result from a common factor, namely the amount of time it takes to create a fully fledged racing game in the current console era. Each car takes six months to model and render. Tracks take even longer to create, and given the increased level of detail required for the Xbox One, it seems that little or nothing could simply be carried over from FM4 (and let's be honest, we saw how badly that approach turned out for GT5).

At any other point, the answer to these new development challenges would have been to delay the game for a few months. We're no strangers to this; installments of both Forza and Gran Turismo are less likely to be on time than they are to be six month (or six years) late to market. But FM5 was scheduled to be an Xbox One release title, and that meant that come hell or high water, it had to ship on November 22. You can see how that resulted in a game that feels unfinished in some regards.

But less than a week after launch, Turn 10 is already beginning to tweak things, dropping the prices of various cars for Thanksgiving as well as boosting the amount of credits you can earn (which you can claim on the game's webpage).

So yes, FM5 doesn't quite live up to its potential at launch, and yes, there are many things that diehard fans like me can point to and complain about. But don't lose sight of the fact that those fondly remembered previous installments also had their share of teething troubles. Unlike days gone by, game studios don't just ship and run these days. They patch, they update, and they fix. So don't believe all the hate you read on the Internet.

I really hate the conscious decision to keep things out of the game for DLC/microtransactions. I don't mind paying for extra material developed by the team after release, but you just know most of that stuff is on a hard drive, waiting to be released.

I really hate the conscious decision to keep things out of the game for DLC/microtransactions. I don't mind paying for extra material developed by the team after release, but you just know most of that stuff is on a hard drive, waiting to be released.

Agreed, I think when DLC is used correctly it's great to have more content for a game you've enjoyed. However Forza Horizons irritated me for the lack of content compared to Forza 4, instead you have to pay for it with DLC and the intrusiveness of the microtransactions were both really irritating for a full priced game.

I guess it's to be expected with a launch title but I'm disappointed that while it looks prettier Forza 5 seems to be a few steps back as a game, I'm a big fan of endurance racing (and assume some of the Ars writers are as well as the recent article on the FIAWEC was excellent) for the large number of cars racing in several classes simultaneously. Forza 4 had a go at simulating this with 12 cars split into three classes but it didn't really work with so few cars, I was hoping we'd see the consoles be able to take a big step closer to proper endurance with much bigger races.

Sadly not though and I wonder if we ever will because there's so much focus on graphics now, I can't blame the developers as just about all the debates I've seen about the Xbox One/PS4 are focused on the graphical output and the difference in graphics hardware and not the games. A long time back the N64 could do four player split screen but it didn't have anything near the power to do it properly so the graphics were seriously downgraded but I didn't think it mattered as four player Goldeneye and Mario Kart were superb. I suspect if any company did that now they'd get torn apart for it.

I notice it most under heavy braking, when they'll heat up and lose grip,

Generally tires gain grip as they warm up and also when they are 'pressed' into the ground by the extra downforce from aero effects or dynamic weight transfer from braking.

Does your sentence refer to loss of grip at the limit of traction (e.g. when inertia of vehicle exceeds the available traction) and/or when heat from friction causes the tire to start to fail (delaminates, grain, etc.) and lose grip as a consequence.?

Apologies I advance if I've misunderstood your point.

Good article otherwise. These next generation racing games are making look hard at getting a new console.

I'd love to be playing Forza Motorsport 5 Dr. Gitlin and your review only reinforces this.

I still think you're letting them off far too easily Jon. If I was in the habit of writing reviews of their products I probably wouldn't take Dan Greenawalt out to the toolshed for his crimes against the obsessively loyal fans of the series.

Reduction of the total number of cars and tracks at launch and a bit of feature incompleteness I can get over.

Not being able to use an $800 wheel and pedal combo that they marketed to me less than two years ago is unforgivable. So now I stare at the Forza logo on my expensive orange paper weight and have no idea why this is the case. They don't even throw us a bone by explaining how it's impossible for us to play with our fun toys and their new racing sim.

I'm really hoping the GT 6 team has taken some UX courses over the past couple of years because that's where I'll be.

I notice it most under heavy braking, when they'll heat up and lose grip,

Generally tires gain grip as they warm up and also when they are 'pressed' into the ground by the extra downforce from aero effects or dynamic weight transfer from braking.

Does your sentence refer to loss of grip at the limit of traction (e.g. when inertia of vehicle exceeds the available traction) and/or when heat from friction causes the tire to start to fail (delaminates, grain, etc.) and lose grip as a consequence.?

Good article otherwise. These next generation racing games are making look hard at getting a new console.

The former, I haven't don't any races long enough to notice a gradual loss of tire, but it is easy to out brake oneself.

PKDAWG - I don't think you can really blame Turn 10 for design decisions made by the people who designed the Xbox One hardware. And FWIW, someone from Microsoft did explain it in a video interview with some other site a few weeks ago.

WRT GT6, can't reveal anything yet, but check back here in a week for my review. Oh how I wish I could spill the beans already

The former, I haven't don't any races long enough to notice a gradual loss of tire, but it is easy to out brake oneself.

Outbraking yourself is just missing a marker and braking too late, missing the apex, not necessarily taking a longer distance to stop. He's referring to heat degredation. When you brake, that does dump a lot of heat into the tire. That helps heat it up when cold(and then grip better) but they have limits so if you have a hot tire and brake after a long straight, the tire may get too hot and start gripping less, then you have to let off the brake pedal and increase stopping distance or lock up the tire and increase stopping distance.

I suppose how they model this is in later laps you can lock up the tires with less brake button travel.

The former, I haven't don't any races long enough to notice a gradual loss of tire, but it is easy to out brake oneself.

Outbraking yourself is just missing a marker and braking too late, missing the apex, not necessarily taking a longer distance to stop. He's referring to heat degredation. When you brake, that does dump a lot of heat into the tire. That helps heat it up when cold(and then grip better) but they have limits so if you have a hot tire and brake after a long straight, the tire may get too hot and start gripping less, then you have to let off the brake pedal and increase stopping distance or lock up the tire and increase stopping distance.

I suppose how they model this is in later laps you can lock up the tires with less brake button travel.

The problem is that "micro-transactions" have become "major-transactions" and that it appears the game mechanic has been developed to put pressure in this direction. One only needs to read Amazon.com customer reviews to understand this.

I truly wish for this game to tank because of the microtransactions. Because otherwise the must have trend that major developers will put on this new generation of console gaming is going to be $60 games built around milking your credit card *coughdeadspace3cough*

Leverage this new generation's power and give us real innovation, not more of the same! Let's see games with fully destructible environments. Trees you can cut down. Buildings you can blow up. I swear everygame feels like I'm running around the laser tag arena instead of actually engaging in the real world. Is the door in the RPG game locked? Don't get a key, mount a wolly mammoth and break that bitch down! Anything is possible!

Perhaps the place to look for that sort of thing is not in a racing game?

The one thought I have, ESPECIALLY considering the way the XBox One is built: has anyone considered hacking compatibility for these controllers? it seems stupid for the incompatibility issue, especially if those controls might be read by a programmable PC.

Leverage this new generation's power and give us real innovation, not more of the same! I don't care about 1080p60 graphics and sunlight effects if the world still feels fake.

Let's see games with fully destructible environments. Trees you can cut down. Buildings you can blow up. I swear everygame feels like I'm running around the laser tag arena instead of actually engaging in the real world.

Is the door in the new skyrim game locked? Don't get a key, mount a woolly mammoth and break that bitch down! Anything is possible!

The one thought I have, ESPECIALLY considering the way the XBox One is built: has anyone considered hacking compatibility for these controllers? it seems stupid for the incompatibility issue, especially if those controls might be read by a programmable PC.

Apparently they switched FFB standards and any device that communicates with the Xbox One needs to do so through a proprietary interface and pay the man licensing fees for the right to do so. Fanatec (the maker of my wheel and pedals) has stated they may pursue this but I'm not holding my breath given their track record.

Quote = Then there's the completely new tire physics. Last time, much was made of the then-new physics model that Turn 10 built to incorporate data from Italian tire company Pirelli. Two years later and all that is out the window, replaced instead by data generated by Calspan, an aerospace and transportation research company based in Buffalo, New York. Even though Pirelli's data was good, it wasn't good enough for Dan Greenawalt and the Turn 10 team.

Leverage this new generation's power and give us real innovation, not more of the same! I don't care about 1080p60 graphics and sunlight effects if the world still feels fake.

Let's see games with fully destructible environments. Trees you can cut down. Buildings you can blow up. I swear everygame feels like I'm running around the laser tag arena instead of actually engaging in the real world.

Is the door in the new skyrim game locked? Don't get a key; mount a woolly mammoth and break that bitch down! Anything is possible!

Let's not pretend that microtransactions are new to the franchise; they've been with us for years now, and they're a dependable way for developers and publishers to evergreen a title and make a return on all those hours of creation. And now that the industry knows enough people will open their wallets for them on an ongoing basis, it's time to accept that they're here to stay. What's more, it's not like you'd avoid them if you stuck to Gran Turismo or iRacing or <insert racing franchise here>.

if you want to keep getting ganked and getting partial games at full price then keep supporting the customer abuse model. It is time for gamers to start showing some self control and not buying games with lots of "for pay" extras. Just wait for GOTY or just skip the game all together. I ended up skipping GT5 due to the bullshit they tried to pull. When you support this you make the world worse.

Quote:

Game developers need to eat too, and maybe it just isn't possible to put together a completely new game on the scale of FM4 or GT4 (both of which were iterative and built on their predecessors) in two years if it's only going to sell for $60.

Stockholm syndrome much? The Forza and GT devs are living much better than you. The execs.. hey, lets not even talk about where most of the "pay to win money" goes.

6 mo to model and render a car... How to car companies release new real cars each year?

Stockholm syndrome much? The Forza and GT devs are living much better than you. The execs.. hey, lets not even talk about where most of the "pay to win money" goes.

I can't speak for Turn 10, but I know the average employee at Polyphony isn't exactly rolling in mountains of yen. The games industry isn't exactly known for being a high paying career, and Japan generally rates worse than the US or Canada.

Game developers need to eat too, and maybe it just isn't possible to put together a completely new game on the scale of FM4 or GT4 (both of which were iterative and built on their predecessors) in two years if it's only going to sell for $60.

I don't think the selling price has much to do with it. Sony is likely selling GT6 on the PS3 to get at that 70m user base instead of the <5m userbase they'll have on the PS4 before year end, what the game costs to buy doesn't have much to do with it.

Microsoft is using it to ship consoles and get a jump in the market. First major car game out there, lets hope it sells. And it's not like it comes out of the game developers pocket, this was a decision made from above.

So they could have taken a hit as a promotional thing and released a full game at $60. Or they could have shipped it on the 360. Instead they tried to milk as much cash as humanly possible out of it and pretend they're still just really good people.

There's also no mention of the pricing on the article. Assuming these numbers are correct, I could buy an F1 racing game for the cost of that single car. That's not nickel and diming, that's insane.

Leverage this new generation's power and give us real innovation, not more of the same! Let's see games with fully destructible environments. Trees you can cut down. Buildings you can blow up. I swear everygame feels like I'm running around the laser tag arena instead of actually engaging in the real world. Is the door in the RPG game locked? Don't get a key, mount a wolly mammoth and break that bitch down! Anything is possible!

Perhaps the place to look for that sort of thing is not in a racing game?

This. In response to the image he used: I care. The little nuances of things like the tires heating up on heavy braking, or the ability to tune air/fuel ratios, or the ability to adjust cam and spark timing, being able to poke at a boost controller on a turbocharged car... having all of those options available beyond just the basic adjustments Turn10 gave us in FM4/5 (aerodynamics, trans gearing, suspension tuning) would be incredible instead of just slapping an amalgamation of random "performance upgrades" together to form a horsepower/torque rating. (Being able to add a "race drive shaft" to a front wheel drive, or MR-with-transverse-powertrain-mounted car is a huge pet peeve of mine. An MR2 does not have a drive-shaft, per se. It's an input shaft directly mated to the clutch. A drive shaft is used to connect the crank to the input shaft on a RWD vehicle.)

For example: If I take a 2.0 liter LSJ supercharged engine, remove the balance shafts, replace with neutral balance shafts, girdle the block, replace the cam and go with a smaller supercharger pulley (2.8 down from 3.2), but I forget to replace the valve springs and retainers, not only am I going to have a very bad day, but power produced will be significantly degraded. Or if I do happen to replace the valve springs and retainers, but use a camshaft that's ground for torque instead of high end horsepower, the change in balance shafts will be, for the most part, utterly useless because the only time they are remotely effective is when spinning your engine over 6,000 RPM. If I do all of the above except girdling the engine block, around the 700 horsepower mark, my cylinder walls will deform into ovals, pinching the pistons within and ultimately cause catastrophic failure. I'd also like the ability to tune to different octane ratings/E85 fuel. (A well-built LSJ with the supercharger gutted and a turbo added can do 891 horsepower on E85.)

Lastly, simulate transmission losses. An automatic transmission loses between 20 and 25% of its power before the tire's contact patch. Reasons? 1) Viscous coupling/fluid dynamic bearing (also known as a torque converter.) There's about a 10% (on average) loss in one of those. You get an additional 5-10% loss through the transmission itself (usually bled off as heat due to the friction of interacting gears.) Then there's the differential which is good for another 5% loss. Now, that's on a 2-wheel-drive vehicle. Toss in two more differentials (transfer case and second differential) for all-wheel-drive, and your losses are sure to be ~10% higher. A mid-engine, rear-drive, transverse-mounted setup with a manual transmission will have the least powertrain losses of any car. So more of the horsepower you produce will actually reach the ground. (Ferrari, Toyota and Pontiac all have cars that match this description. 328GTB, MR2, Fiero. There may be others.)

So - yeah, there are still PLENTY of ways a racing game can innovate. Would be even better if they used a fluid dynamics physics engine to simulate the mixing of air and fuel vapors flowing into a cylinder, the compression of that cylinder and resulting combustion as well. Let it pre-detonate (knock) if your tuning is off. Run the risk of throwing a piston through the hood of your car if you over-boost (like I've done in the past, in real life. Not fun. But a part of racing you'll have to deal with eventually if you use super/turbocharged cars.) It would add an additional dynamic to the game, but that last sim (fluid dynamics) wouldn't really be possible on today's hardware.

EDIT: Left out a concluding paragraph, so it was a bit awkward. Fixed.

Making games is an expensive business. I don't see how people can argue at the same time that they want a lot of expensive content, but not pay anything more for it. Every generation gets more expensive for major retail release console game development, and prices just aren't rising to compensate because people won't pay it. All they have left essentially is to figure out how to make more money from an existing customer base without scaring them off by raising the price.

I wonder if we'll see a consumer backlash to the DLC model we're moving towards. In the case of Forza, I'd rather they give it to use all upfront: The base game will run you $60 and come with 100 cars and 15 tracks (or whatever). Additional content packs will be $10 each with AAA, BBB, CCC, DDD, and so on available for purchase/unlock.

As has been stated, as long as we pay for it, they'll keep doing it. Will be interesting to see if the game companies misjudge market interest/tolerance and see a collapse. The $60 price point for new games seems immutable and as long as DLC is the vehicle for recouping investment in development, we'll see more content shift into that mode. But at some point, people are going to reject paying $60 for an engine with extras for content. Studios may have been better off selling games at a higher release price point. I'd rather pay $100 for Forza 5 with as much content as possible available at launch and guaranteed free DLC over the life of the game than what we have now.

It's all moot for me because I'm not buying an Xbox one. I've got too much invested in a 360, including unfinished games, XBLA games, and driving peripherals that are all unusable on the XB1. Argue that hardware changes prevent backward compatibility for 360 games, new software architecture prevents XBLA transfers, and new standards for peripherals but I think you're full of shit. No reason at all that this couldn't have been factored into the new design. I know we couldn't play Nintendo games on Super Nintendo but you could play PS games on PS2 and GBA advance games on DS. I don't particularly begrudge MS the decisions they made but I'm not interested in a new platform with the couple thousands of dollars invested in the current one that is wasted. I'm curious how long 360s will be available for though. I'm going to be upset when mine dies and I can't replace it.

Making games is an expensive business. I don't see how people can argue at the same time that they want a lot of expensive content, but not pay anything more for it. Every generation gets more expensive for major retail release console game development, and prices just aren't rising to compensate because people won't pay it. All they have left essentially is to figure out how to make more money from an existing customer base without scaring them off by raising the price.

So long as the rising costs are treated as axiomatic, you've got a more or less intractable problem (unless the userbase is expanding, since the marginal cost of pressing another copy is close to zero, and that might be helping, since new gamers seem to be spawning faster than older gamers 'age out').

The question, though, is whether rising costs are axiomatic, or whether costs are rising in part because companies have gotten better at hiding some of the price, cell-contract style, which reduces the incentive to do things that save money (like re-use engines, avoid licensed trademarked assets, skimp in non-core areas of simulation and graphical accuracy, etc.)...

I'd imagine that consoles are an especially perverse market for cost-hiding, since it pervades the hardware side as well(with console makers often accepting losses or near-zero margins; but squeezing peripherals and license fees, and sometimes competing hard for release-day, exclusive, or delayed-on-competing-platforms material); but the same general outlines apply to PCs.

Obviously programmers and artists aren't going to work for nothing, nor should they; but the same is true of actors and video production types, and we still have movies with budgets starting at ~1 million (excluding largely experimental film-school-subsidized-because-all-the-actors-are-my-friends-and-I'm-editing-it-for-free stuff, where the budgets start close to zero) and petering out somewhere north of a quarter-billion. You cannot have everything for nothing; but there is clearly room for something other than vaccuous acceptance that cost increases are inevitable.

This is a pet peeve of mine. There is nothing "realistic" about lens flare, unless you are looking at the world through a camera viewfinder all the time. It may be "cinematic" (i.e. that's how such a scene might look in a movie), but in real life there's no lens flare.

The steering wheel situation is the biggest crime in my eyes, and there is no reason for it.

OK, so you created a "new and improved" version of Force Feedback? Great! Good idea, very welcome, BUT, that DOES NOT mean you have to lock out all of the old wheels just because they don't support it! They can still use the old method of FF.

This is nothing but filthy dirty money grubbing by M$ (emphasis on the $) and yet another colossal XBONE PR blunder.

This is a pet peeve of mine. There is nothing "realistic" about lens flare, unless you are looking at the world through a camera viewfinder all the time. It may be "cinematic" (i.e. that's how such a scene might look in a movie), but in real life there's no lens flare.

I have completely straight eyelashes, so I have always had god rays and some lens flare . I think however that they're more talking about windshield reflections and HDR "blinding"

Let's not pretend that microtransactions are new to the franchise; they've been with us for years now, and they're a dependable way for developers and publishers to evergreen a title and make a return on all those hours of creation. And now that the industry knows enough people will open their wallets for them on an ongoing basis, it's time to accept that they're here to stay. What's more, it's not like you'd avoid them if you stuck to Gran Turismo or iRacing or <insert racing franchise here>.

if you want to keep getting ganked and getting partial games at full price then keep supporting the customer abuse model. It is time for gamers to start showing some self control and not buying games with lots of "for pay" extras. Just wait for GOTY or just skip the game all together. I ended up skipping GT5 due to the bullshit they tried to pull.

Or perhaps it's time that some game design classes and even some business classes and learn how much effort and costs goes into the PIDDLY amount of money they are paying for the game.

Developers are just trying to play the world's most impossible game of give-and-take. People demand 1080p 60Hz with 100 tracks and 500 cars and they only want to pay you $60? Let's put it into perspective. You're giving them $60, not $600. Not $6,000.

Oh and actually that person is likely paying the developer $0 anyway because they bought the game used at Gamestop and still expect developers to lick their boots.

Honestly, I don't care for Forza any more than I care for ANY racing game... but just looking at any forum or review just SPEWS this attitude that the players are experts int he field. So go on, make a AAA game, THEN you can pretend like you know what you're talking about.

If we could stop saying we are getting so much for $60, what would be great. The revenue for these games has exploded.

Revenue, yes. Profits, no. Profits as Average ROI are stupidly low. Lower than almost any other commercial tech industry (Apple and Google are making 30-40% profit on costs whereas game development is usually around 5-7% even WITH microtransactions. It'd be even lower without them. I can't remember if it was Polygon or Ars that did a really in depth look on this, but people who love to rant and rave remained willfully ignorant. Costs have also skyrocketed. And in normal businesses, when costs increase... so do prices. It's not rocket science.

Game developers need to eat too, and maybe it just isn't possible to put together a completely new game on the scale of FM4 or GT4 (both of which were iterative and built on their predecessors) in two years if it's only going to sell for $60.

I can't accept that. The industry has been making games for decades without any of that bullshit.

I can't accept any game that sacrifices gameplay for anything. Forza sounds like a great game, I'd love a racing game with that physics engine, but I refuse to spend money supporting a developer who is, in my opinion as a software developer, ruining the industry.

If advertising can pay for racing in the real world, it can cover a simulator too. If the up-front price can't fund a game, then the developers should turn to advertising not crippling gameplay.